Woke up to a cooler morning, but clear skies. We were in no great rush as we only had a 3 hour journey ahead of us. After a leisurely breakfast, Lyn sorted out the inside of the trailer, and I did the out side stuff. We paid close attention to the check list as we hadn’t towed the beast for some time. Finally, we were all set to go around 11:00, trailer connected, lights checked, walk around complete, brake controller che….. ummmm where’s the brake controller?
For those that don’t know; large trailers like ours have electric brakes on the wheels to help stop the extra weight, it wouldn’t be very fair, or safe, to ask the truck to do the all the braking for both itself and 12,000 pounds of trailer. A small box is connected inside the truck that activates the trailer bakes when the truck brakes are applied, ours is a little more sophisticated than that, and will measure the degree of braking; the harder I brake the truck,the more power is applied to the trailer brakes.
Back to the blog, the brake controller is disconnected when I am not towing and is placed in the glove compartment, problem is it wasn’t there. In fact it wasn’t anywhere. The truck was searched by Lyn, then by me….. NO controller. No controller means no go (or more correctly no stop). After a quick discussion we decided to head up to camping world at slow speed and see if they had any in stock. At 40 mph in light traffic very little braking is needed, and luckily no emergency stops were required. In fact at slow speed the truck can handle the braking pretty well.
Even if Camping world had a controller in stock we would still have to spend quite some time mounting it in its bracket and wiring it into the truck, as each controller is different.
Finally our luck changed, Camping World had the exact same brake controller that we (once) had, albeit at $100 more than I paid for the original, but by now that was not an issue! 5 minutes later it was installed and we were on our way. Still no idea where the original is as it never leaves the truck.
On the good news side, the roads were clear, we ambled along at 55 mph getting a remarkable 14.4 mpg and my new rear view camera worked a treat. It really made lane changing much less stressful.
We arrived at the campground around 14:30, nowhere as near as pleasant as the one we had just left, but adequate for a 4 night stay. At the moment there is some rain in the forecast but hopefully it won’t prevent us from exploring the area.